The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

At the end of 1963, Jakarta served as host for the GANEFO, or the “Games of the New Emerging Forces” (characteristically, Sukarno gave them an acronym). This was an Olympic Games for the Third World, and its slogan was “Onward! No Retreat!” The games originally came about because of a fight that broke out when Indonesia excluded the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Israel from the 1962 Asian Games. The Western-led International Olympic Committee suspended Indonesia from its games in retribution, so he turned around to put on an anti-imperialist games, which the IOC didn’t like one bit.

In the 1960s, the PKI had increasingly moved closer to China’s side in the Sino-Soviet split, partly because Beijing was more supportive of Indonesia in its territorial conflicts. But technically the PKI was still ideologically committed to the Soviet Union’s anti-Stalinist line. These were the years in which Mao was sidelined as a result of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958. Suspicious that the Soviets were trying to hold him back, he ignored their agricultural advice and launched a wildly utopian farming program. Millions died in the resulting famine, and the other leaders of the Chinese Communist Party put the blame, rightfully, on Chairman Mao. He was forced to resign from party and national leadership,

the PKI didn’t think it had to take orders from anybody.7 It was now the third-largest communist party in the world, the largest outside China and the Soviet Union, and its strategy of nonviolent, direct engagement with the masses had led to impressive results. The PKI now had three million card-carrying members. The organizations affiliated with the party—including SOBSI (the Central All-Indonesian Workers Association), LEKRA (the People’s Cultural Institution), BTI (Farmers Alliance), Pemuda Rakyat (People’s Youth), and Gerwani (Women’s Movement)—had at least twenty million members. This added up to nearly a quarter of Indonesia’s population of one hundred million, including children, and nearly a third of the country’s adult registered voters were PKI affiliates.8 They operated openly, in every corner of the country. But at the national level, they relied almost entirely on Sukarno for their influence over policy. They had no other choice.

Sukarno no longer felt any shyness about taking on the West. His revolution had bested the CIA in 1958; he had gotten Kennedy and the Netherlands to back down on West New Guinea. With interventions in Brazil and escalating interventions in Vietnam apparently confirming his view of Washington as an imperialist aggressor, he felt he was on the right side of history. So he overestimated his strength, and took on the United Kingdom while problems grew at home.

Malaya, a colonial possession covering the Malaysian peninsula from the Thai border down to the tip of Singapore, was one of Britain’s last and most important territories in Asia. When London finally decolonized the region and began to create the new country of Malaysia, Sukarno became adamantly opposed to the form it took. He believed that the English were employing imperial trickery to weaken revolutionary forces in Asia. He was mostly right. And Howard Jones knew it.10 The British did not want to create a country that was majority Chinese, since too much of Malaya’s population, especially in Singapore, sympathized with communism for their liking. As a solution to this “problem,” London added its possessions on the top half of the huge island of Borneo into what would become Malaysia, and excluded the island of Singapore. This move would combine the entirely distinct peoples of Sarawak, Borneo, and Sabah into the new Malaysia, which would dilute the proportion of ethnic Chinese to levels the British considered acceptable. The southern half of Borneo was part of Indonesia—so Indonesians would share a long border with British colonial territories shoehorned into Malaysia just to dilute the power of leftists. One very rough way to understand this is to imagine that, after revolution swept through the United States, King George III made Protestants in Northern Ireland citizens of Canada, allowing him to make sure loyalists to the crown would win elections in perpetuity north...

Much to the chagrin of British authorities, Sukarno declared in early 1963 that the formation of Malaysia was “the product of the brain, the thinking, the goals, the effort, and the initiative of neocolonialism.”

a few months after JFK’s death, Jones asked the newly sworn-in Johnson to sign an official determination that continued aid to Indonesia was in the US national interest. Johnson declined. “President Kennedy, I knew, would have signed the determination almost as a matter of routine. It was disappointing,” Jones remembers. In December, Robert McNamara, one of the advisers left behind by Kennedy, began suggesting aggressive curtailment of aid. “Thus began a shift of emphasis in American policy to a harder line,” the ambassador wrote.20 This was also the end of the Smiling Jones approach to uniting the two countries, the strategy he had developed for nearly a decade. Johnson did make a deal, with the British. In exchange for their support in Vietnam, where things were also beginning to escalate, Washington would back them on the creation of Malaysia.21 Sukarno noticed a shift in the way the world’s most powerful country was treating him. He went so far as to speculate that JFK was killed in order to stop him from visiting Indonesia and cementing an alliance between Washington and Jakarta.22

Though he expressed gratitude for aid that was offered without political strings attached, one line, delivered in English, predictably made headlines—and traveled quickly back to Washington. When anyone offers aid that comes with political demands, he said that his message to them was: “Go to hell with your aid!” As Jones put it, “He had really done it now.”23 Whatever goodwill there was for Sukarno in Washington began to dissipate. Over the next few months all direct aid to the national government dried up completely. Crucially, one program continued. The US continued to pour money directly into the Armed Forces, and military advisers continued to work closely with Indonesian Army high command.

The Howard Jones approach to Indonesia was over. In his short resignation letter to President Johnson, he wrote, “Indonesia is a beautiful country with gentle, friendly people. I have great faith in the Indonesian people and believe they will ultimately work their way out of their present difficulties.” He continued, “I am convinced that there is basic empathy between the people of America and Indonesia.”28

When Jones’s diplomatic approach collapsed, both the US and the British governments escalated secret activities in Indonesia. Their full nature is still hidden to us, but they included “black operations” and preparations for psychological warfare. The British created the position of “director of political warfare” in Singapore in December 1964. The US government approved a secret plan on March 4, 1965, though the funding source and the amount of money provided remain classified. Most of the secret activities were probably carried out by CIA and MI6. Given the way these organizations operated, it is almost certain that operations also included placing untrue or provocative stories in the Indonesian and international press. They wanted to goad the Communists into taking action. Since the early 1960s, both the American and British governments had believed, and discussed often, that the ideal situation would be a “premature PKI coup” that could provoke an Army response. It’s possible that some version of this plan had been worked on secretly, under the cover of Kennedy’s civic action program, since 1962.32

As 1965 went on, rumors that right-wing generals were conspiring with the CIA or some foreign power began to spread like wildfire in Jakarta. The Indonesian government found a letter, purportedly written by British Ambassador Andrew Gilchrist, stating “it would be as well to emphasize once more to our local army friends that the strictest caution, discipline and coordination are essential to the success of the enterprise.” Sukarno summoned the military chiefs, demanding to know who these “army friends” were. The “Gilchrist document” could have been a forgery. It could have been real. Or it could have been planted by the British or Americans as a psyops trick, perhaps one of many, to provoke the left into action.39

Aidit, the leader of the Indonesian Communist Party, and some members of the People’s Youth also arrived at Halim Air Force Base at some point on October 1. They were in a different building, and unable to communicate directly with the leaders of the Army rebellion. The movement had cut off telephone lines in the city, and they didn’t have walkie-talkies or radios. Nor did they have tanks, the standard equipment for coup plotters at the time.45 The confusion lasted for no longer than one day: within twelve hours, the movement was crushed, and the Army, now led by right-wing General Suharto, was in direct control of the country. More than fifty years later, we still don’t have a complete understanding of who planned the Gerakan 30 September, or what the real purpose of the night raid was. What we have is a range of credible theories.

Then there are the entirely plausible assertions that General Suharto, the man who took over after the dust settled, planned or infiltrated the movement, perhaps with foreign assistance, to engineer his rise to power. He was, after all, close to the leaders of the rebellion. Suharto had a history of conflict with Nasution and Yani, and was the only high-ranking, openly right-leaning Army official not targeted by the movement. Former Foreign Minister Subandrio, the same man who had to listen to Howard Jones deny that the CIA was bombing the country back in 1958, presents a credible insider’s account, in which Suharto was notified in advance by his friends leading the September 30th Movement; he pledged his support to them, but instead planned to hold back and use the rebellion as a pretext to seize power.50 G30S leader Latief also said, afterward, that Suharto was informed of the plans in advance.51 We know there was a conspiracy. Unless the CIA and other organizations such as the Indonesian military release what they have, we can only theorize as to its true nature based on the available evidence.52 But the next part of the story is not in doubt. After the events of October 1, General Suharto seized control of the country, and told a set of deliberate, carefully prepared lies. These lies became official dogma in one of the world’s largest countries for decades.

On October 1, 1965, most Indonesians had no idea who General Suharto was. But the CIA did. As early as September 1964, the CIA listed Suharto in a secret cable as one of the Army generals it considered to be “friendly” to US interests and anticommunist.

Once in command, Suharto ordered that all media be shut down, with the exception of the military outlets he now controlled. Curiously, Harian Rakyat—the Communist Party newspaper where Zain had worked for more than a decade—published a front-page editorial endorsing the September 30th Movement on October 2, a full day after the coup had failed and the offices were reportedly occupied by the military. The fact that it was the only nonmilitary paper to come out that day might indicate that the Army published it so as to incriminate the party, or it may indicate that the party thought there would be nothing incriminating about going forward with a piece offering support for an internal Army movement with, at that time, the seemingly laudable goal of stopping a right-wing coup.57 Theories abound.

The military spread the story that the PKI was the mastermind of a failed communist coup. Suharto and his men claimed that the Indonesian Communist Party had brought the generals back to Halim Air Force Base and begun a depraved, demonic ritual. They said members of Gerwani, the Women’s Movement, danced naked while the women mutilated and tortured the generals, cutting off their genitals and gouging out their eyes, before murdering them. They claimed that the PKI had long lists of people they planned to kill, and mass graves already prepared.59 They said China had secretly delivered arms to People’s Youth Brigades.60 The Army paper, Angkatan Bersendjata (Armed Forces), printed photos of the dead generals’ bodies, reporting they had been “cruelly and viciously slaughtered” in acts of torture that were “an affront to humanity.”61

The Western press did its part too. Voice of America, the BBC, and Radio Australia broadcast reports that emphasized Indonesian military propaganda points, as part of a psychological warfare campaign to demonize the PKI. These broadcasts reached inside the country in Bahasa Indonesia as well, and Indonesians remember thinking that the credibility of Suharto’s narrative was more trustworthy because they heard respected international outlets saying the same thing.64

by 1987, when Anderson’s proof was published, not much of that discovery mattered anymore. The story of a demonic communist plot to take over the country by mutilating good, God-fearing military men in the dark of night had become something like part of the national religion under the Suharto dictatorship. Not long after he took over, Suharto erected a monument to the men killed that night, just like the Brazilians erected a monument at Red Beach in Rio de Janeiro celebrating their fallen heroes. The two structures are even similar—at both, steps lead up to a white marble slab, with a bronze figure, or figures, of the military victims standing in front. Just as with the Intentona Comunista in Brazil, Indonesians celebrated the anniversary of the event each year as a kind of anticommunist national ritual. But the Indonesian monument is bigger. And Suharto took this propaganda a bit further than statues and annual speeches—he ordered the production of a gruesome, three-hour film depicting his version of events, which was broadcast on September 30 each year on public television. The Army still screens it.

The story spread by Suharto hits on some of the darkest fears and prejudices held by Indonesians, and indeed men in general—around the world. A surprise night raid on your home. Slow torture with blades. The inversion of gender roles, the literal assault on strong men’s reproductive organs carried out by demonic, sexually depraved communist women. It’s the stuff of a well-written, reactionary horror film, and few people believe Suharto came up with it himself. The similarities with the Brazilian legend of the Intentona Comunista are striking. Just a year after a coup in the most important nation in Latin America was inspired partly by a legend about communist soldiers stabbing generals to death in their sleep, General Suharto tells the most important nation in Southeast Asia that communists and left-wing soldiers whisked generals away from their homes in the dead of night to be murdered slowly with knives, and then both Washington-aligned anticommunist military dictatorships celebrated the anniversary of those rebellions in very much the same way for decades.

Suharto managed to give official legitimacy to a wildly anticommunist narrative, an absurdly fanatical and exaggerated version of global right-wing ideology. This was an astonishing turnaround from just weeks earlier. But Sukarno was still technically the president, and there were still a whole lot of people in the country who were communists, or broadly tolerant of communists. Over the next six months, the Army took care of both problems.

Purwokerto, Central Java—In the early afternoon, two police officers arrived at Magdalena’s family home, less than twenty-four hours after her arrival. “You’re coming with us. We need some information from you,” they told her. The entire house erupted, crying, screaming. Magdalena’s family had heard some people were arrested recently in the neighborhood, but they didn’t know she was a member of a SOBSI union in Jakarta, and neither they nor Magdalena knew that could ever be a problem in the first place. At the police station, officers began to yell at her, interrogating her. They told her they knew she was a member of the Gerwani, the Women’s Movement affiliated with the Communist Party. She wasn’t. She didn’t know what to say to them, except that she wasn’t. According to the mythology spread by Indonesia’s new command, this meant she was part of the group that danced naked while mutilating the military high command’s genitals. She was in Jakarta, they said. Maybe she was even at the slaughter. She didn’t know anything about this, she told them. These interrogations started, and stopped, and started again, for seven days. Then the officers took her to another police station, in Semarang. As soon as she arrived, she collapsed. She was sick, or overwhelmed. She was dizzy all over. She was seventeen years old. She’s not sure how long she was at the second police station before two police officers raped her. She was Gerwani, in the minds of the police, which meant that she was...

Working with CIA analysts, embassy political officer Robert Martens prepared lists with the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and handed them over to the Army, so that these people could be murdered and “checked off” the list. As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965. “It really was a big help to the army,” said Martens, who was a member of the US embassy’s political section. “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”16

That night, while everyone was sleeping, they took away twelve of the prisoners. They took away Sutrisno. They took away Suhada. They took away his friends Kamdi and Sumarno and Suharjo. They never came back. No one ate breakfast the next morning. There was no more singing. No more cheer. No one talked. This couldn’t be happening. It went against everything Sakono had learned, and believed, his entire life. The military and the police were defenders of the revolution. Indonesia had a system of law and order, of fair trial, of evidence and justice. He had barely seen any violence in the nineteen years since he was born. “I’m not a rebel! I’ve never held a weapon! I would never rebel against my country! I never did anything wrong in my whole life!” Sakono shouted, over and over, but silently inside his own mind, as his body quivered, terrified he would be in the next group to be taken away.

This was a new characteristic of the mass violence. People weren’t killed in the streets, making it very clear to families that they were gone. They weren’t officially executed. They were arrested and then disappeared in the middle of the night. Loved ones often had no idea if their relatives were still alive, making them even more paralyzed with fear. If they complained, or rebelled, could that be what cost their imprisoned loved ones their lives? Might they be taken too? Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that mass murder is occurring, the human instinct is to hold out hope that your son, or your daughter, might still be saved. This freezes people, and makes populations much more quiescent—easier to exterminate and easier to control. Historians who study violence in Asia believe this was the first time forced “disappearances” had been used.

The country’s largest Muslim organization had a youth wing and an armed wing, the Ansor and Banser. These were acronyms, but the founder of the Banser said that he wanted the word to sound like Panzer, Hitler’s famous tanks. He also said he had been studying Mein Kampf, starting in 1964, in order to learn how to deal with the Communists.18 These groups participated in the killings in Central and East Java. In Aceh, the military press-ganged and threatened suspicious civilians, politically suspect individuals or outcasts, into carrying out the murders. Afterward, they would often down alcohol to numb themselves to what they had just done.19 Whatever happened, whoever it was, almost all of Sakono’s friends were gone now, and corpses were piling up everywhere.

The State Department received a cable from Jakarta. The US embassy passed on some more reports of Army progress. The message ended precisely as follows: E. Army info bureau also reported that para-comandos (RPKAD) in armoured vehicles entering city of Surakarta (no date given) were blocked in village at outskirts by nine “witches” from PKI women’s affiliate GERWANI, who insulted them and refused to let them pass. After asking them quietly to give way, and firing into air, para-comandos were “forced by their intransigence to terminate breathing of these nine GERWANI witches.” 3. Miscellanous [sic]: Beginning what we believe will be major fad, Bandung renamed part of its main street “General Yani Boulevard” yesterday. It’s good he has an easily pronounceable name. Green20

Bali—The violence arrived on the island of Bali in December. It’s almost like it started at Indonesia’s westernmost tip and moved east across the main population centers, through Central Java, to East Java, and then to Bali. Like the movement of the sun, only precisely in reverse. The slaughter in Bali was probably the worst in all of Indonesia. As the new year began, the island convulsed with violence.

The people of Bali knew something was very suspicious about the outbreak of violence. People were being killed with big machetes. Machetes are not native to the island. Balinese people use the klewang, a thinner, local blade. Someone must have brought the heavy weapons in from another island.

The machetes arrived around the same time that military anticommunist propaganda campaigns, nationally coordinated, arrived in Bali. One rumor declared that Gerwani women had plans to sell their bodies in order to buy weapons for a communist revolt, and to castrate the soldiers they seduced. Propaganda teams toured rural areas, spreading stories like this, driving home the message that the people must “be on the side of the G30S or stand behind the government in crushing the G30S. There is no such thing as a neutral position.”27

In total, at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed—that is, eighty thousand people, probably the highest proportion in the country.29 The Balinese had been especially strong supporters of Sukarno’s multifaith political project, because it gave Hindus more freedom in a Muslim-majority country.30 A severe economic crisis in the early 1960s made the communists’ promises of redistribution more attractive to some—and more threatening to others. The PNI killed Suteja, the governor, and members of his family, and spread the myth that he actually chose to nyupat, or volunteered to be executed and be reincarnated as a better person. Some Balinese were indeed asked if they wanted to nyupat or not. But those who said no were killed anyway, rendering the question meaningless.31 They were executed, murdered one by one, over just a few months, for affiliation with an unarmed political party that had been entirely legal and mainstream just weeks earlier. A little bit later, the first tourist hotel went up on the very beach, Seminyak, that had been used as a killing field.

Ambassador Marshall Green: Prior to October 1, 1965, Indonesia was for all practical purposes an Asian communist state.… Events of the past several months have had three major effects on Indonesia’s power structures and policies: 1. The PKI has ceased for the foreseeable future to be an important power element. Effective action by the Army and its Muslim allies has totally disrupted the party’s organizational apparatus. Most Politburo and Central Committee members have been killed or arrested, and estimates of the number of party members killed range up to several hundred thousand.… The memo listed the plan for the US response: 1. Ensure that our actions and statements do nothing to shore up Sukarno and his henchmen.… F. Without becoming directly involved, promote arrangements between the [Government of Indonesia] and the American oil companies.… H. Within the limits of prudence, give open or covert advice and assistance to responsible and competent anti-communist groups for worthwhile activities.32

Sukarno’s reaction to the killings was both resignation and desperation. Though he wasn’t getting full reports from around the country, he knew violence was taking place, and seemed overwhelmed by the avalanche of anticommunist propaganda. He told one group of officers and journalists, “Over and over it’s the same thing… razors, razors, razors, razors, razors, a grave for a thousand people, a grave for a thousand people… over and over again, the same thing!”33 He urged restraint, entirely ineffectively, as Suharto’s forces literally hacked away at the number of people on the left wing of Indonesian politics.

Broadly speaking, the violence in Jakarta was not as intense as it was in places like North Sumatra, Central and East Java, and Bali. Perhaps because those were the main centers of mass support for the PKI and for Sukarno himself, and perhaps because they couldn’t treat leftists in the capital—surrounded by press and elites and diplomats—the same way they were treating regular people, far from the city.

Most of the Western press repeated the narrative being peddled by the new Indonesian government, which Washington was enthusiastically welcoming onto the world stage. That story went, more or less, that some spontaneous violence erupted when regular people found out about what the communists had done, or been planning. These articles said that the natives had “run amok” and engaged in bloodshed. Because the word “amok” originated in Malay (the language that formed the basis for both Indonesian and Malaysian), this made it easier for Western journalists to employ Orientalist stereotypes about Asians as primitive, backward, and violent people, and blame the violence on a putative sudden, irrational outburst.39 On April 13, 1966, C. L. Sulzberger penned a piece, one of many in this genre, with the headline “When a Nation Runs Amok” for the New York Times. As Sulzberger described it, the killings occurred in “violent Asia, where life is cheap.” He reproduced the lie that Communist Party members had killed the generals on October 1, and that Gerwani women slashed and tortured them. He went on to affirm that “Indonesians are gentle… but hidden behind their smiles is that strange Malay streak, that inner, frenzied blood-lust which has given to other languages one of their few Malay words: amok.”40 The Malay, and now Indonesian, concept of amok actually referred to a traditional form of ritual suicide, even if the anglicization now refers to wild violence more generally.41 But the...

In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered, and one million more were herded into concentration camps. Sarwo Edhie, the man who ambushed Sukarno in March, once bragged that the military had killed three million people.44 There’s a reason we have to settle for estimates. Because, for more than fifty years, the Indonesian government has resisted any attempt to go out and record what happened, and no one around the world has much cared to ask, either. Millions more people were indirect victims of the massacres, but no one came around to inquire how many loved ones they had lost.